Trip
by Firefly99
Summary: [OGC] [CloudxBarret] He hadn’t expected to see him again and he hadn’t wanted to either. He was a bad experience made human. He spoke of fire and blood and misfortune and hatred and vengeance that he’d rather ignore and forget.


He'd done his best to tell himself that everything was over, trick himself into thinking that he'd never see the others again, fool himself into thinking that a nice happy life with Marlene was all that was left, but of course that wasn't true. It was all just a Cloudish illusion he'd cooked up, and somewhere inside him he knew that. But he acted, and he pretended, and sooner or later he knew he'd end up believing that he was a SOLDIER First Class as well.

It was harmful, and it was damaging, and it hurt to turn away from Marlene's gaze every time she mentioned one of the others. But it was better to forget than to carry on living with Reactor Number One on your soul.

And so it was horrible when the ghosts woke up again and _he_ appeared. Same firm soft skin, the kind you only get when you're in your twenties and very lucky; same stubborn mouth; same tangle of dry peroxide hair, thick and horribly rebellious and stuck up all around his face like the mane of some mad lion. He was wearing new clothes; a pair of sunglasses perched on that long, broken-out-of-shape nose hid a pair of eyes that he knew had burned into the back of his brain, too surreal, too hallucinatory, eyes that he still had flashbacks of, like a bad drug trip. Eyes that he found ever so hard to meet for months and months until he worked up the courage and found they were more soporific and hypnotic than frightening. Mako was knowledge and the knowledge in his eyes was his, so his gaze felt ever so sad. A sadness that left its mark on your mind.

He hadn't expected to see him again and he hadn't wanted to either. He was a bad experience made human. He spoke of fire and blood and misfortune and hatred and vengeance that he'd rather ignore and forget. Forgetting was far sweeter than remembering. His nights were still haunted by the sounds his sword made as he struck down an enemy. He'd never been able to chop meat again. He never thought he'd raise his little girl a vegetarian – they'd never had enough money to be picky about food before now. But now every month money came in through the post from the desk of a Mr. Tuesti, an unwelcome reminder that his hallucinations had been real, that he was living in a Cloudish fantasyworld, and suddenly he and his little girl could enjoy everything they'd never been able to afford.

He was flattened against the door, his shoulders drooping, panting. There was a tattoo on his upper arm, which was something new. Two crossed swords crosshatched in black ink, stark against that canvas-white skin. Two swords just like _that_ one. The one that meant he couldn't have kitchen knives in the house. Whenever he saw a knife these days he always saw two tiny materia slots in the blade for tiny materia except they weren't tiny at all because his mind always scaled it up, like looking at a person from a distance. It was one of the reasons it was safer to forget.

"Sorry about kicking your door open," he says. His Nibel accent had thickened a great deal. Not a trace of Gongagan in his dialect now. "I had to. I had to hide. They're after me."

He had to admit he'd heard gunshots and engines outside but he'd thought they'd come for him. Why he didn't know _didn't remember **wished he didn't remember**_ but it didn't stop him taking the useless prosthetic gun from the table, removed from his arm forever now, replaced with a metallic prosthetic that Sh – that a mechanic's best friend - built for him, because he'd once known the mechanic, _but he couldn't remember where from_, and holding it as if it was a real gun and never a part of anyone.

"Don't just stand there gawping, idiot," he snapped, his voice far too deep and warm to belong to that ruthless killer, too rich in memories to belong to anyone else. "Help me build a barricade. Or do you want them to get me?"

Elegant, calloused hands. Fingers long but gnarled to fit around a sword grip. A long, thin, white stripe of a scar across both palms, perfectly parallel and perfectly matching. It hadn't hurt so much to see them back then. But these days, in those dreams, he felt a hot white-cold pain across his hands where that scar was.

Of course, he wasn't killing with those hands now, not like usual. He had run into the living room, emerged carrying a sofa above his head as if it was weightless, pressed it up right against the door. He eased that huge _kitchen knife_ off the corroded magnet strapped to his back, and jammed it into the doorframe as a wedge.

There were angry voices outside now for some reason. They were using the kind of language that he wouldn't want Marlene to hear.

"Stop standing around and help me!" screamed the memory, bleached blond hair flying around his face as he shouted. He was incredibly tired, still panting from running. It occurred to him that he'd never seen that man before _quite that tired_. He must have really been through the mill.

His sunglasses dropped off his face; he made no attempt to catch them before they hit the ground.

"Listen," he said. "I know about what's happening to you because it happened to me, too. I know more about this than you could imagine. I've sprinted solidly half-way across the continent trying to get somewhere safe. The least you can do is hide me. I'll be gone as soon as they decide I'm not here." He paused a moment, and then looked straight at him, his eyes the colour of sadness and old smoky memories. "I'll go silently. I won't talk to you again. I'll keep out of Marlene's way. You won't even know I'm here. Just help me, for God's sake!"

He shook a little, and carefully peeked around the corner of a curtain, at such an angle that they wouldn't be able to distinguish his face.

"It's OK. They're only at the entrance to the town," he said. "They think I'm in here, but I don't think they'll start kicking down peoples' doors to find me." The spectre laughed a little. "They look really confused. It's sort of funny to watch them all fight amongst each other. They're worse than us lot used to be."

It was a mirthless, grim laugh, a laugh that he'd heard _and wished he hadn't_ far too often, a laugh he resorted to when everything was going wrong and there was nothing he could do about it. After the flower lady had _cut herself on her kitchen knife_ he'd laughed long and hard into the night. It'd broken something inside him. That laugh always brought back bad dreams.

"So," he said, finishing his laughing, "don't you wanna know what's going on?"

"No."

"You've changed," the ghost said, raising an eyebrow. "But then again, it changes all of us. Changed me too." He stared up at him. "God, I don't care that you've gone all crazy and reclusive and vowed never to talk to the rest of us. I really don't care. That's your choice. But…just hide me. From these people. Please." He smiled a little, just barely. "It's still nice to see you again. I've never been so relieved."

The ghost's hands were shaking in fear, though, so it obviously wasn't a lot of relief.

"You look different," he said, obviously trying to engage in cheerful banter to calm himself down. "That's a new mechanical hand, right? I heard Shera mention it. Suits you. I bet it beats shooting the tops off cans and things. They wired it into your muscles, right?"

"Why're you interested?"

"Just am. Biology. Doctoring. Cutting people open and sticking other bits in. It's a morbid curiosity."

The phantom stared at him hard for a second, puzzled. Then he gave the first genuine – if rather shaky – smile he'd given since he entered.

"You've lost the beard, right? I knew you looked different," he said, rubbing his chin in sympathy.

"Disguise."

The ghost rolled his eyes. "Well, it didn't fool the people you really wanted to fool, did it?" he said, carefully moving away from the window.

He rooted around in his pockets and produced a packet of cigarettes. As he lit one, his hand trembled hopelessly – it took him a good minute to get it to catch. Carefully, he drew it to his mouth, drawing the smoke in deep, and blowing it out in a succession of little ragged clouds.

"I thought you were smart," he snapped at the ghost, who winced.

"Ah," he said, looking down at the cigarette, "you mean this, right? I was a heavy smoker from thirteen until…well, you know. In retrospect, it was probably one of the reasons I didn't get in. Now, Zack…Zack didn't, and that must have stuck with me. But now I'm myself. Complete with all my old flaws. But…but, on the bright side, they're not capable of killing me or even harming me at all…I don't get much of a rush from them either, but right now I could use the deep breathing…"

"There's a kid in this house," he heard himself say. He'd always hated the smell of cigarettes. They'd always made his lungs hurt.

"Well, I'm not about to risk opening a window, Barret," the phantom said, with a wan smile.

"Then stamp it out."

"What? On your nice expensive carpet?"

It was like old times. They could argue over absolutely everything under the sun. Even something as simple as a cigarette. Old times that it was probably best to shut out.

He decided to stop fighting, for old times' sake. The less he could remind himself of what happened, the better.

"Fine. Smoke if you want. I don't care."

The ghost looked a little put-out.

"I was looking forward to an argument," he sighed, deeply. "But whatever. Listen – I promise I'll be good. I won't cause a fuss. I'll hide if you want. I'm a claustrophobe, remember, but I'm more scared of them then I am of…little spaces, and that's saying something. As long as I stay relaxed there shouldn't be a problem. I'll find a cupboard or something."

"That won't be necessary," Barret said, quietly. "Jus' stay out of my way. An' don't even think about talking to Marlene."

"Thanks," he said sincerely, taking a long deep drag on the cigarette. "I'm so sorry to spring this on you like this, but it needs to be done. Everyone else…they weren't close enough, I don't know where half of them are, I couldn't get there, and the ones I did know…they were even worse than you. Cid just pretended he didn't recognise me, asked me to get the hell out of my house. Red's busy – playing shaman or something, hopped up on Cosmo mushrooms, hearing colours and seeing smells – you know, it's actually a religious sacrament over there – and I didn't want to go to him anyway because they'd follow me and enter the canyon and I didn't want it destroyed, it's too precious, it's one of the only places on the Planet which remains untouched and special – also, it's defenceless, I didn't want a whole army storming it. And Tifa and I had…some problems, I couldn't go back to see her."

"Tifa…"

"I don't want to talk about it. Just like you don't want to hear about it, I'm sure…"

Barret had never seen someone concentrate so hard on smoking a cigarette. With most people, it was casual, second nature, easy, but with him he lingered on it, stared at it, drew each inhalation of smoke right deep down into the pit of his stomach and breathed out slowly and gradually. And he barely paused between breaths. It was like he was trying to keep his mind off other things, almost meditating, with the cigarette between his lips.

"I do wanna hear."

"You've changed your tune."

He shook off the concern. He was good at doing that. He'd been doing it for years.

"Stay," he grunted. "But only until they come. And I want you to feed yourself. Don't expect me to find food for you."

And, as the old saying goes, that was how it all got started. Afterwards Barret agonised about whether things would have been different if he'd made the phantom go.

He'd made a sensible promise – Barret did hardly notice him. He barely ate anything. He seemed to subsist entirely on a diet of strong tea and occasional, illicit cigarettes that made the room stink of smoke for days. He was losing weight; he didn't have a lot of weight to lose in the first place, so that almost _almost_ made Barret worry. He would always be at the window, watching between the slats in the blinds. His pursuers had set up camp in the centre of the town – most people were too terrified to go out. His hair was starting to grow out, dark roots completely unseen before, alien against his pale skin – even when Barret knew him he'd never let anyone see the natural colour, always carefully touching it up before it was really visible.

Marlene noticed that he was there, but she pretended not to – the night he'd agreed to let him stay, he'd given her a very long lecture about how she was not to talk to him under any circumstances whatsoever.

"They're after me again," he'd say to himself, giving that little laugh, probing the ends of slender fingers through the slats in the blinds. "I'd thought they wouldn't bother…"

And of course Barret wanted to know who they were; it would be a lie to say he wasn't curious about the identity of the pursuers. Even when he'd called the phantom _friend_, he'd known that he was steeped in a lot of dark history that he wanted no part of, and so he simply hadn't asked. Tifa – his friend, one of his old friends he wasn't in touch with any more – had told him some of it, without him asking her first; about the mansion, the ghosts there in the basement, how they'd chopped him and changed him and modified and remixed him into something brand new and deadly, a proud soldier from a scared child. He still remembered the bitter taste in his mouth as she'd told him that. He still remembered just how horrified he'd been that time in the Crater when That Bastard had explained everything. And those horrible weeks of thinking he was completely fake – _I don't believe the Shinra could create humans…_

So it had to be connected with that somehow. They had to want him back. Perhaps he was a manifestation of technology too powerful to get out; perhaps they needed to protect him from the world, keep his artificial body and copyrighted soul in some laboratory for the interest of science. Whatever it was, it must be to do with the scientists.

No, whatever it was, it must be serious enough for them to send an entire army into Kalm. And tell them not to break into any of the houses, either – instead, to siege them quietly. They knew where he was; they wouldn't be hanging around here if they didn't. So why didn't they just kick all the doors down, slaughter everyone, find the ghost and drag him off with them? They couldn't be that unscrupulous if they were resorting to siege tactics.

He didn't want them anywhere near him, though. Or anywhere near Marlene. And if they came here and tried to take the ghost, she'd be in danger. That was one of the few things that stopped him storming up to them and just telling them where he was.

Once, he'd left the house for supplies only to have a gun shoved in his chest, so he'd just wrestled it out of the way. He knew how to deal with guns. It wasn't the first time it'd happened, no matter how much he tried to forget it, and he wasn't scared – besides, the soldier had a very young face under that helmet and wasn't about to shoot a random civilian. Way too afraid. Probably bound by the same rule that stopped the soldiers charging into each and every house to find the phantom drifting in Barret's own kitchen.

It had been sunny outside. Or at least as sunny as it gets under still-dissipating smog from where Midgar had used to be. But he'd noticed that whenever he entered his own house it became night-time again. He was a solitary, oppressive shroud, always watching, always pretending not to be afraid. He looked as if he had been frozen – reminded Barret of a procedure he'd heard about once, where they injected corpses with plastics until they became statues. His eyes were glassy, and a little too wide, and that optical-illusion greenish glow reflected from the surface of the window. He wondered how they didn't glance up and spot the glowing pinpricks of his eyes and break in and catch him.

The ends of his clothing were slightly torn. He suspected that he'd torn the sleeves off the top himself. Vaguely, in some locked-up part of his mind that he tried not to explore, he remembered the shroud being rather proud of his solidly muscular arms. But he'd never been vain. Except about that hair of his. And that was the only vanity he allowed himself. It looked terrible these days, though – now, he looked like he'd survived a few too many sweating, screaming, tossing-and-turning, hallucinogen-comedown nights.

It just keeps coming back to bad trips, doesn't it?

It was the ghost who broke the vow of silence in the end, because he seemed to think he knew him.

"I'm tired, Barret," he said, and so Barret had ignored him. He'd sighed a little, and traced a greasy swirl on the glass with the tip of his finger.

"I'm sorry," he continued, but then his voice became more challenging, colder, crueller. "Is that still your name, or did you ditch it and make yourself a new one?"

"I told ya not to even start talkin' to me," Barret replied, anger boiling up within him, _how dare you pretend to know me!_, so mad he wasn't even shouting. Just talking. Almost like a civil human being. Five years ago he would have been yelling away like a klaxon by now.

"It's alright," the ghost continued, as if Barret hadn't spoken – too late he picked up on the slight Gongagan twang he was adopting in his words, the cheerful, light-hearted delivery, sarcasm at its worst. "It's al_right_. Hell, I erased my entire identity too, you know! It's not a sin. It's just natural. It's what you want to do. So what's keeping you from doing it?"

"I – "

"Look," he said, accent returning to normal. "I know. I understand. You should have known what I did with my life when it first ended for me. Shellshock. Crude little word. And it wasn't as if we saw any shells, either. They didn't drop bombs on our heads. Do you know what I think?" he asked, rhetorically, knowing full well that Barret wouldn't reply, then continued. "I think it's not called shellshock because of bombs. I think it's because you get shocked into becoming a shell."

"You said that you were tired."

"You know what it's like," the ghost continued. "You don't think. You don't live. You just…work. You're on autopilot. Like a clock. I am tired, that didn't make any sense."

Barret cast back his mind. Had he ever seen the phantom sleep at all?

"Get some sleep," he commanded, being careful not to sound like there was any affection in his words. _I don't know who the hell you are._

"…I don't sleep much," the ghost said, labouringly. "Not much. Not any more."

"How long's it been since you last slept?"

"I don't know," the spirit said, frowning, dark hard beautiful eyes glazing over a little. "About a week? Two weeks? Dunno. Didn't really mean to go to sleep. I only remember waking up with a stiff neck not having a clue what was going on."

"That's not healthy."

"I know it's not."

"Then tear yourself away from the damn window."

"Oh really?" he challenged, turning round a little, eyes flashing. "And then what?"

"Get somethin' to eat," Barret suggested. "Maybe even sleep."

"I can't sleep with this going on," he snapped, loosely gesturing outside. It was night-time – the pinpricks of the soldiers' activated night vision visors were like a cloud of fireflies in the breeze.

"Then eat somethin'."

The ghost gestured silently towards a line of stained mugs along the sill.

"That doesn't count as food," Barret said, surprised to note he sounded almost affectionate – he snapped out of it with a loud, "you're just too stupid to know it."

It was the sort of comeback Marlene would have come up with. No, she would have come up with something far more scathing. Clever little thing, she was. Not like him. His whole life, people'd thought him slow because he was strong and you can't be both strong and smart at once, when in reality he just wasn't good with people. He understood how they worked, all right, because he was good at observing things from the outside, but in a group he always became either the leader or the grunt. Never the friend. He had all sorts of qualifications and things, and still no-one took him seriously. Because he was strong. Because he used to work in manual labour jobs. Because he'd gotten used to being alone, except for Marlene and a gaggle of losers who'd gravitated to him, having nothing better to do.

One of them hadn't, though. One of them had been born to upset the status quo – he made Barret tumble from king to peasant because he was simply easier to obey. He'd hated him on sight. He'd resented him for usurping the throne, as well – why the hell had they chosen _him_ over him, _he_ was just a kid, _he_ didn't even know his own name half the time and certainly wasn't trustworthy. _He_ had one hell of a history, too. A soldier with no scars…it could mean he was naïve and inexperienced. Or it could mean he was so good that no bullet could touch him.

When he eventually found the answer, it turned out that it was equal parts both.

Some old memory surfaced in the back of his mind. Dusk in the desert. The scent of sand high in the air, chill spreading over his skin. There was something really electric about dusk, all heightened senses and energy.

That was the time he'd first looked that man fully in the eye.

There wasn't anything else to do, he recalled. The others were asleep in the back of that piece of crap eighth-hand out-of-date stupid buggy that the Asshole In The Thong had palmed off on them, since he couldn't be bothered to have it disposed of properly, and he wasn't. Because he was afraid of falling asleep. He knew that the second he closed his eyes, everything would replay itself, and he'd have to watch _it_ again.

No-one had asked for that man to join him. So normally he would have gotten mad. But he felt too broken at the time to start making a fuss, and the other man sat beside him and said nothing.

Then he'd looked around at him, and forced himself to meet those ridiculous SOLDIER eyes dead on, and it hurt the back of his mind slightly, but his expression was so full of sorrow that it helped a little, knowing that the feeling was shared.

But he hadn't really shared the feeling, had he? Because he wasn't human. He hadn't been human for so, so long, and you can't feel things the way people can if you're not human.

Was that why he wasn't getting angry now? Because he was broken, the same as he was that time?

Or perhaps he was just so damn angry he wasn't shouting about it?

Finally, he realised that he didn't have the slightest clue what was going on in his own head any more. Not too different from this kid here. No, even he seemed almost to have it all figured out now. Smug little bastard.

"Barret," he said, "I'll go and get something to eat."

"Five years," Barret said, and the ghost stopped, and looked over his shoulder to stare at him.

"It's been five years. Yeah."

"And everythin'…"

The ghost nodded. "Tell me about it," he said, voice expressionless. "I got myself married."


End file.
